Nice test, Swaroop.
This goes to show that not all easy puzzles are boring.
A lovely introduction to these types where a lot of existing puzzles written could be impossibly difficuly for newer solvers.
Thanks!

Thanks Swaroop, this felt like a perfect PR round to me. Easy puzzles (but, honestly, not *that* easy to solve rigorously, so very much appropriate for a contest targetted towards less experienced solvers. Thanks a lot!

I feel lucky for the instant grading, since my one mistake was a real mistake (I'd let some transparent yajilin clues unused by the loop) and not just an input error.

Nice test, Swaroop.
This goes to show that not all easy puzzles are boring.
A lovely introduction to these types where a lot of existing puzzles written could be impossibly difficulty for newer solvers.
Thanks!

Thanks Swaroop, this felt like a perfect PR round to me. Easy puzzles (but, honestly, not *that* easy to solve rigorously, so very much appropriate for a contest targetted towards less experienced solvers. Thanks a lot!

I feel lucky for the instant grading, since my one mistake was a real mistake (I'd let some transparent yajilin clues unused by the loop) and not just an input error.

Of the puzzles you solved/attempted, how well did the point values reflect the difficulty?

Most puzzles were worth the right amount

What was your opinion of the booklet formatting and printing?

Just right

A very nice set. I was afraid of trio cuts eating my time, happily I got them fast enough. 12-pointer Border Nurikabe was pretty fun but maybe overvalued, after some initial progress I was convinced that the regions will mostly be "outlined" by borders (especially the 9) so it worked quicker than expected. My favorites are the large classic yajilin and the transparents. Thanks for the puzzles! Stay safe everyone.

A very nice set. I was afraid of trio cuts eating my time, happily I got them fast enough. 12-pointer Border Nurikabe was pretty fun but maybe overvalued, after some initial progress I was convinced that the regions will mostly be "outlined" by borders (especially the 9) so it worked quicker than expected. My favorites are the large classic yajilin and the transparents. Thanks for the puzzles! Stay safe everyone.

Thank you, everyone, for their wonderful feedback and participation. I will divide my overall thoughts into different categories.

Puzzle Types:
I wanted to have a mix of some standard puzzles and some new variants which are bit unpopular or don’t regularly appear. So I choose Nurikabe, Windows, and Yajilin in the regulars. In the un-popular category, I was first trying to select Every Second Breakpoint and even created two puzzles of it, but was not satisfied with it, as they were coming out very trivial. Then I found Myopia Loop and really liked it, so I went with that. I also liked Transparent Yajilin and Ripple Loop very much.

Puzzle Difficulty and Quality:
Definitely I wanted the test to be on the easier side and accessible to newcomers but maintaining the puzzle quality, so that it doesn’t become trivial solve (Unless you are Ken Endo – Impressive performance). Looking at the performance with 88 solvers finishing the test, I think I achieved that. Based on the feedback from most of them, I feel happy that you enjoyed the test and really liked the puzzles.

Puzzle Points:
I think most of them agreed with the point structure, with very few of them concerning Nurikabe Borders being overrated. I partially agree with you that, this puzzle might feel overrated if you can intuitively see the areas (especially for numbers 8 and 9), then it becomes easy. But for newcomers, who are trying to solve step by step, it will definitely be more challenging. So I hope you understand our methodology of setting the points of this puzzle to be high.

Answer Keys:
I wanted it to be simple and consistent across puzzles. I know it might not be possible to do a similar thing in a lot of tests, but fortunately, it worked out here. I believe no complaints here from anyone.

Winners:
Congratulations to the top 3 Overall: EKBM, WA1729 and fff1015.
Congratulations to the top 3 India: Prasanna, Rohan, Ashish. (Special mention goes to Amit and Kishore too for finishing the test). Good performance by Priyam too, considering new in this field.

Thankings:
Thank you, everyone, again for their feedback. A special thanks to Rakesh, as always doing an extraordinary work behind the scenes, for bringing everything together, for testing, feedback, etc. Thanks to LMI for providing me the opportunity to author the round.

Final Words:
If any of you are stuck in any of the puzzles, please feel free to post in the forum, or message me directly, would be happy to help you. Best of luck for the next PR. Good luck to Priyam for Authoring Debut along with our veteran author Prasanna.

Thanks to the 241 participants from 39 countries. Congratulations to Endo Ken, Walker Anderson and Soji Kubota for finishing the set in under 30 minutes. Ryotaro Chiba (Japan) was the first to start the test while Michael Tang (USA) was the last person to start the test. The median score of the test was 83.8.